-
Asking if Wikipedia is becoming a hub for propaganda, Canada’s Globe and Mail points out that an online database has shown 11,000 edits to the encyclopedia made from government computers. Tracking edits made by companies and governments has become a popular pastime this week, since grad student Virgil Griffith created the database, called Wikiscanner.
-
When word spread last year that Congressional staff members were feverishly editing their bosses’ Wikipedia entries, Virgil Griffith asked himself: How many company spokesmen & campus officials were doing the same thing? Griffith created Wikipedia Scanner, a searchable database that links anonymous Wikipedia edits with the businesses and organizations from which those markups came.
-
Seidman’s simple thesis is that in this transparent world “how” you live your life and “how” you conduct your business matters more than ever. “The persistence of memory in electronic form makes 2nd chances harder to come by,” writes Seidman. “In the information age, life has no chapters or closets; you can leave nothing behind & you have nowhere to hide your skeletons. Your past is your present.
-
Maybe you want to throw your incumbent representative out of office in the next election. Well it may not be easy, especially if you live in a state where redistricting has lead to ultra-safe seats for incumbents. A group of computer programmers at the University of Southern California developed a videogame to explain the process and show constituents how to win.
-
Wayne Chiang (23) was mistaken by some as the VT shooter--partly because his Facebook profile includes references to graduating from Virginia Tech and several photos of him with his gun collection. At first, Chiang says he "played along with it" on his personal web page, partly to see how much money he could make, since payment from the ads he places on his site are based on the number of hits.
-
A school board trustee has come under fire for taking legal action against an anonymous blogger "Orthomom" who has written a number of scathing criticisms on her blog about the trustee's lack of support for private school students. Many support Orthomom's right to free speech. My question is, does she have any responsibility to reveal her identity, rather than attacking the trustee anonymously?
-
Last summer, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, hired Patrick J. Hynes, a conservative blogger and political consultant, to be his campaign’s blog liaison. Mr. Hynes quickly ran afoul of fellow bloggers by initially concealing his relationship to the McCain campaign while he was writing critically about other Republicans.
-
Is your online social life suffering? Having problems getting rid of that pesky friend on MySpace or Facebook? Want to give Tom the boot, but are afraid of hurting his feelings? Then this is the place for you. BreakYourSpace is a unique service that specializes in breaking up with your online friends.
-
Digg's system works only so long as the crowds on Digg can be trusted.
The author created a low-quality story and hired a Digg-gaming service called User/Submitter to buy votes. Digg's system works only so long as the crowds on Digg can be trusted. Whether they can be trusted in the long term remains to be seen, given the incentives built into the system for voting on the most popular stories.
-
This article is filled with stories of people cheating reputation rating systems to earn trust. It also describes Paul Resnick's research on the role of online rating systems in building trust. Resnick seems to argue for a structural approach to curbing the cheating - create powerful algorithms to force people to be trustworthy.